


A Case of Good Etiquette

by Castillon02



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Misunderstandings, Returning Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 10:10:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8574241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: Having recently moved into Q's house, Bond returns from a mission to find that his first welcome home has gone a wee bit awry.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beginte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beginte/gifts).



> For Beginte's tumblr prompt of "You drank a gallon of milk overnight." Thanks, Beginte! You are the best prompter/cheerleader ever! 
> 
> And thank you also to consultingreaders for her beautifully thorough beta, and to amarulasmile for her encouragement!

Bond made six kills, foiled a dozen assassination attempts, and talked to Q over comms three times before he returned from his mission. He picked up groceries on the way back, immersing himself in the mundanity of the Tesco experience: the bounty of food and drink, the polite nods to fellow customers, and the quiet queue of tired people who wanted to go home and eat as soon as possible and who probably hadn’t murdered anyone. When he walked out of the store, it was with plastic bags full of enough food for three meals and a packet of Haribo coke bottle sweeties for Q, as if he had stepped out three weeks ago to hunt some lunch instead of some people. 

He let himself into Q’s house, grocery bags in hand. Feeling a little self-conscious, he called, “I’m home!” 

Home: a result of cohabitation that far made up for the damn tool kit he found taking up valuable kitchen counter real estate when he went to set the bags down. 

Their house—no longer just Q’s—had changed a little with the addition of Bond’s things, but it was no less familiar: Bond’s coats on Q’s coat rack; Bond’s scotch sharing space with Q’s eclectic collection of vodka and liqueurs; Q’s cats curled up on Bond’s plush sofa. 

Arse and Dim twined around his ankles, yowling as though Q had been starving them. Given that Q could activate their electronic feeder through an app on his phone, Bond doubted that that was the case. 

“Pull the other one, you shameless beggars,” he told them, but bent down stiffly and scratched behind their ears. 

Arse, a bob-tailed ginger, purred like an engine and nuzzled his palm, scent-marking him. Dim, a tiny brindled shorthair with the usual tail length, sniffed at his hand, ascertained that Bond didn’t have any treats for him, and started to groom. 

Usually the owner wasn’t far behind the cats, but he hadn’t heard a peep out of Q. Bond frowned. It was technically his first time home from a mission. Before he’d moved in, he’d usually gone back to his flat first, showered and decompressed, and then gone to Q. Now his home was here, and he’d hoped... 

“Q?” he called, making his way to Q’s office. 

Q’s office door was closed. Bond knocked on the door, a lesson drilled into him after the time he’d entered without warning and been greeted with “Wait, don’t—” and the sounds of something delicate breaking as the door hit it. Luckily, the resulting conflagration had been small. 

“Q?” Bond asked again. 

“Busy!” Q called from inside. “Talk to you later!” 

“Oh. All right,” Bond said, caught flat-footed. 

“Thanks!” Q said, and then nothing. 

Bond walked back to the kitchen and tried not to feel like something inside his chest was shrinking. Q often got caught up in important work. He might even be assisting in something vital to Six. There was no reason for him to be a nitwit about the fact that Q hadn’t rushed at him with open arms the instant he got home. It was fine. 

Bond stuffed Q’s tool kit into what seemed to have become the miscellaneous cupboard in his absence, next to a griddle and a rheostat, and put the groceries away. Since he wasn’t feeding two, he made himself a simple plate of scrambled eggs and buttered toast, which he ate on the sofa while watching Patton Kizzire start to gain an early lead in California; Q had recorded a golf tournament for him.

Once Bond finished eating, Arse claimed his spot on Bond’s lap and Bond’s hands did their trick of turning him into a purring cat-puddle, a warm, happy weight keeping Bond anchored to the sofa, to the house, to the present. Dim watched like a judgmental gargoyle from the top of the cat tree next to the television. He was Q’s cat most of all, and probably missed him. Bond could relate. 

“He’ll come out soon,” he told Dim. “Work can’t keep him all night.” Well, work could and had, but Q wasn’t at work, he was at home; whatever was keeping him holed up in his office couldn’t be that important. 

The food, the golf, and the cat did their work. Bond’s muscles grew lax and his eyes grew heavy. The golf commentators’ talk morphed into a blur of sound. He blinked, long and slow. His hand slid involuntarily off of Arse’s back; he spent a few moments frowning at it before realizing what had happened. “Time for bed,” he told Arse, and unceremoniously dumped him on the sofa so he could stagger upright. 

Still no Q. 

“Q,” he called, returning to the office. “You all right?” 

“I’m fine!” Q’s voice said, perhaps a little energetically. “Still busy, sorry!” 

What the Devil was he doing in there? “Sure you won’t say goodnight?” Bond asked. Even if Q was busy, he might still have time for a goodnight kiss. 

“Goodnight!” Q said. “See you in the morning.” 

Well. A warm welcome that was. “Good to see you too,” Bond muttered. 

“Good to see you!” Q’s voice chirped back at him. He sounded oddly perky. Caffeine, probably. Which meant Bond could look forward to several hours of Q sleeping off his binge in the morning instead of a nice breakfast together. He’d be lucky to see Q by brunch. 

“Your dad is an arse,” he told Dim, who was sitting behind him, staring at the door to Q’s office as if he could will it to open. 

In the bedroom, Arse curled up in his customary place next to Bond’s pillow and Dim sprawled in Q’s usual spot and attempted to take up the entire bed. Bond performed his evening ablutions, stripped off his clothes, and climbed in between the cool, clean sheets, which smelled like whatever “ocean freshness” was supposed to be. Q had made the bed for him.

Golf and a clean bed; there were worse ways to show love. 

*** 

Bond woke naturally, or rather woke as the sun started to stream through the cracks in the curtains and Arse began purring and shoving his disgustingly wet cat nose into Bond’s face. 

“Piss off, Arse,” Bond said. He tumbled Arse onto the mattress and scratched behind his ears and at the base of his tail for a minute while Arse purred madly. 

Still no Q. 

Was World War III starting? Had someone died? Had someone released _Half-Life 3_ and made Q’s wildest nerd fantasies come true? 

Bond pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms, black with martini glasses on them, a gag gift from Q last Christmas that had become less painful the more often Bond wore them. So armed, he left the bedroom, determined to get answers. “Q?” he called down the hall, and then added, obnoxiously loud, “Good morning, dear!” 

“Still busy, sorry!” Q’s voice called, just as it had yesterday. 

Bond growled. Was he really going to have to text his own fucking boyfriend in his own fucking home in order to get more than three words out of him? 

Before he could work himself into a proper snit, however, he heard a distinct “Rrrrgh shit fuck damn it all,” also in Q’s voice, but this time low and rough: Q’s voice just after giving a blowjob, or just after his eyes first blinked open in the morning. Unless Q had been practicing auto-fellatio, sleeping beauty had clearly just awakened, and hadn’t been the one giving him those ‘busy’ messages. 

The pieces started to click together. 

“Q,” Bond said through the door, “I don’t suppose you built a robot of yourself while I was gone and forgot to turn it off?” 

The office door finally opened. Q, bundled in his fluffy green housecoat and blinking sleep from his eyes, stumbled out and face-planted into Bond’s chest. His arms locked behind Bond’s back and Bond found that his own had automatically risen up to cradle Q’s shoulders. 

“I missed you,” Q mumbled into Bond’s good shoulder, his bird’s nest hair tickling Bond’s neck. “And it was a voice-activated auditory ejection program, not a robot. I forgot I had it on.” 

Ridiculous man. Bond squeezed him hard, reveling in the sleepy warmth and strength of him. “I missed you too,” he said. As he hugged Q, his eyes drifted over Q’s shoulder to the office behind him, visible through the open door. There was an empty milk jug on top of the mini-fridge next to Q’s desk. A splash of milk beside the mug on Q’s desk looked fairly fresh. “Wait,” he said. “Did you wake up in the night?” He pulled back to see Q’s face. If this was all a technological misunderstanding borne of Q’s ability to sleep through fire drills if he was tired enough, then why wouldn’t Q have climbed into bed with him when he woke up instead of exiling himself to his office? 

Q flushed and looked away. “I might’ve been silly,” he muttered. He buried his face in Bond’s chest again and growled low in his throat. 

Bond relaxed. That growl was a sound of chagrin if he’d ever heard one. “You, silly?” he asked, mock-surprised. “I don’t believe it. Come to bed,” he said, kissing the arch of Q’s neck, “and you can tell me about your silliness there.” 

Q shivered under his lips and hummed into Bond’s shoulder, but when he lifted his head he said, “Shall we eat breakfast first? I missed you, but I haven’t eaten in eighteen hours. Also, I need a piss.” 

***

Before leaving Q to his morning business, Bond stole a brief kiss. It tasted like milk and morning breath, but it was still much better than no kiss at all. After a quick brush of his teeth, he headed to the kitchen to put a few slices of bread in the toaster, flick the kettle on, and start up the expensive coffee maker that Q had been forbidden to tinker with on pain of forced celibacy. 

By the sound of things the reunion with the cats waylaid him in the corridor, but Q made it into the kitchen in time to pounce on the toast as soon as it popped up. He made himself cheese on toast, marmalade on toast, and Nutella on toast, and wolfed it all down over the sink. Only after he’d eaten did he glance at the kettle, and by then it needed to be turned on again. 

Having accepted Q’s apology cuddles, Arse planted himself in front of the food dish in the corner like he intended to be a while, and Dim hopped onto the counter to practice his gargoyle impersonation. 

Meanwhile, Bond toasted and buttered more bread, fetched a plate, and ate his breakfast at the kitchen table like a civilized human being. He also poured himself a glass of milk, mainly to enjoy the hilariously nauseated look on Q’s face when he laid eyes on it. 

“Never again.” Q shuddered, and when he sat down with his tea he brought a box of muesli with him solely to block the offending glass from his view. 

“So,” Bond said, “you built a talking robot.”

“It’s not a robot!” 

Bond took a sip of milk to hide his grin. 

“It’s an auditory device programmed to mimic the sound and content of natural conversation with the goal of sending people away as quickly as possible,” Q said. 

It had worked, too, which Bond was a mixture of proud and pissed off about. “You couldn’t just tell people to go away?” he asked. 

Q arched his eyebrows. “Sometimes, 007, when you’re very lucky, my mouth is too busy doing other things to tell people to go away.” 

“Oh.” Bond tried to look like he’d been expecting that turn in the conversation. 

“Eve, Tanner, and Mum all came to visit while you were gone. Not at the same time. They all have keys to the house,” Q explained. 

Understanding dawned. “You built a gadget in case they visited at an inopportune time,” Bond said, charmed. An anti-cockblocking device. Only Q! 

“I had paranoid visions of all three of them descending on the house at once, while...well, I might have had plans for when you got back,” Q admitted, and darted a sly glance at Bond. “If you were up for them.” 

“Oh?” Bond’s lips drew up into a cat-smug smile quite without his permission. 

Q slipped his housecoat down one arm to reveal a slender silk strap around his pale, jutting shoulder. 

“ _Oh_ ,” Bond said, transfixed. 

Q smirked and tugged his housecoat back into place. 

Deprived of that lovely distraction, Bond said, “All right: you turned on your go-away robot—”

”It’s not a robot!”

”—you got yourself nice and snug in that lingerie, you wrapped yourself up in that housecoat because you were cold and because you thought I might be too tired to appreciate your efforts,” Bond leered to indicate his very awake and energized appreciation of said efforts, “you fell asleep, you woke up, you realized I was home, and...you decided to stay in your office instead of coming to bed?” He quirked his eyebrows. 

Q mirrored Bond’s expression. “You came home after your mission, said hello to the cats, realized I was in my office, and...decided to listen to a recording of my voice instead of coming in and discovering me in my nice snug lingerie?” 

“You never let anyone in your office,” Bond pointed out. “The last time I opened the door I literally exploded something, and then you exploded at me too. If it sounds like you want to be let alone for a while, I’ll let you alone. Sometimes people need that.” 

“I know,” Q said, his voice softened from its previous archness. “You’ve never come here right after a mission before. I wasn’t sure you’d want to, even though you’re properly moved in now. I woke up and saw from the security that you were home, and heard how quiet it was, and thought you’d gone to bed without me because—well, because you wanted me to let _you_ alone. I didn’t want to wake you, so I just...”

“Stayed in your office and subsisted on biscuits and milk?” Bond asked. 

Q groaned and hid his face in his hand. “I was out of biscuits,” he muttered. 

“No,” Bond said, feigning horror. “Not out of biscuits!” 

Q dropped his hand and rolled his eyes, but a smile was starting to tug at his lips. “I watched YouTube videos and drank the entire carton of milk, and after a while I got over my sulk about not having you or at least some biscuits, and I went back to sleep on the sofa,” he said, and then he snickered. “All while dressed in some quite nice lingerie and this housecoat!” 

Bond had to laugh. “Poor thing!” he said, and reached across the table to squeeze Q’s free hand in his. “Or poor things, the pair of us. You drank a gallon of milk overnight, and I went to bed with only the cats for company, and both of us thought the other didn’t want to be disturbed. We’re idiots.” 

“We’re inexperienced,” Q corrected, never one to let a slight to his intelligence go uncorrected. 

There was a pause as they both followed the connotations of ‘inexperience’ to their natural conclusions. 

“It was our first time,” Q said slowly. “We were bound to be a little clumsy.” 

“Quick to jump to conclusions,” Bond said. 

“Prone to forgetting about important precautions in the excitement,” Q added.

“Prone to falling asleep at unfortunate times,” Bond teased. 

“You know what?” Q said, eyes glinting. “We clearly need some practice.” 

“A do-over,” Bond offered. 

“Right,” Q said. “You go outside for two minutes and come back in, and we’ll have a second go at it.” 

Bond went outside, pretended to check the mail even though it came later in the day, lingered in the doorway, and found that two minutes was just long enough for him to begin feeling ridiculous about this whole thing. So what if his first proper welcome home hadn’t been perfect? He and Q had both overcome their tragic case of good etiquette and found each other this morning, which was the important thing. 

Still, Bond opened the door as he had last night and stepped into the foyer. “I’m home!” he called again, shutting the door behind him. 

Arse came to see him again, always interested in whoever walked in the front door. As before, Bond bent down to scratch him behind the ears and under his throat, feeling the vibrations of his purring. 

“Someone’s happy to see you,” Q commented from the kitchen doorway, his eyes crinkled with amusement. He’d changed out of his robe and into one of Bond’s shirts, the collared blue one that Q had once rubbed off on while Bond was wearing it and which had mysteriously failed to make it into Bond’s dry cleaning pile the next day, fated to be worn soft and starchless by Q’s washing machine, separated from its companion suit forever. 

The shirt had tails that brushed over Q’s thighs, much as they did Bond’s—he and Q were of a height. Pale silk gleamed tantalizingly beneath the hem. The softened neckline hung off of one of Q’s shoulders, exposing a delightful slip of collarbone and the same thin silk strap from earlier, while the fabric tailored for Bond’s bulk hid Q’s lithe build and intriguing undergarments as much as it exposed them. Q’s legs looked muscular and vulnerable, bare of the trousers and pajamas he usually wore. His hair was still utterly untamed. 

“I’m happy to see someone,” Bond replied belatedly, and stood. 

The thing to do would be to swoop Q up into an embrace, to kiss him breathless, to pull him closer. Bond found himself walking silk-soft instead, bare feet on Q’s wood floor, and he put his arms around Q’s shoulders as he had that morning. He kissed Q’s slip of collarbone, kissed the bob of his Adam’s apple, kissed the flush on his cheek. Q smelled like milk and tea and his hands rested on Bond’s hips. 

“I missed you,” Bond said, and found it just as true as when he’d said it earlier. 

Q licked his lips. “I missed you too,” he said, and kissed him, his warm lips sliding against Bond’s while his hands slid down to curve around Bond’s arse and tug him close. He tasted of chocolate and toast this time. Q broke the kiss with a smile and a question, asking, “Shall we go to bed so I can show you how much?” 

Suddenly, Bond knew exactly what to say. “Let’s stop by the kitchen first,” he said, smirking. “I haven’t had coffee in over eighteen hours, you know.” With all their talk in the kitchen, he'd forgotten to pour himself a cup. 

Q’s mouth dropped open. “You vengeful twat!” he said, laughing. He pulled Bond to him and bit Bond’s shoulder in a stinging reprimand that lit up Bond’s spine with heat, and then he nuzzled his way up to Bond’s neck and bit again, softer this time, before pressing an obnoxious smacking kiss just there. “Very well,” Q said, pulling back. “We'll stop by the kitchen. While we’re there, you can show me what you’ve done with my tool kit!” 

“It’s next to the griddle,” Bond said, and pecked a kiss onto Q’s lips. “Which is not its permanent home, by the way.” 

He was maybe a little vengeful. Just a tiny bit. It would be fun to sip his coffee as slowly as possible, and perhaps play footsie with Q under the kitchen table, and see if they’d both be able to last until he was down to the dregs. 

Mostly, however, he thought that though they had been late about it, they had gotten their welcome home right the first time. Fucking Q in lingerie would be gorgeous, but “I missed you” and the warmth of Q’s arms around him—what better welcome home than that? 

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism is welcome. Thank you for reading! <3


End file.
